You go to hell and you die

Vox Day’s “The Irrational Atheist” is now freely available for download. I’ve got the pdf on my machine, but it would feel wrong to read it before finishing “The Blank Slate”. I’ll probably have to reread that before reviewing it as there have been some long gaps during which I’ve likely forgotten a lot of things I was planning on saying.

The latest post at the Hoover Hog points out the Antinatalism blog. The three viewpoints it pushes are rejection of “Religious Truth, Free Will, and Existential Affirmation”, which are things I look forward to discussing in the near-future rather than yacking on about libertarianism and racism some more. I had already been reading and commenting at the blog a few days ago (a post responding to one of those comments is here), but I decided not to make a post about it before Chip because knowing about something that others don’t makes me feel special. Now that I’ve spilled the beans I can add it to my blogroll, so up it goes. Readers who enjoy that might also like Possessed by Death, a blog by Andy Nowicki of the Last Ditch, though it unfortunately seems to have stopped after five posts by the end of 2006. I think a sufficiently out-there Christian like Vox Day is well position to argue against antinatalism. Though Chip earlier used something like Pascal’s Wager to argue that the possibility that one’s child will risk eternal damnation in hell prevents Christians from having children, Thomas Aquinas famously proclaimed long ago that we should not mind the suffering of the damned but rather rejoice in it as the fulfillment of God’s will. If Vox may consider the massacre of children to be as acceptable as a programmer deleting a data structure, why not also shrug off the eternal hellfire poured out on those wanting of the grace of God?

On a completely unrelated subject, via BLCKDGRD comes this far left anti-Zionist attack on Walt & Mearsheimer’s “The Israel Lobby” thesis. You can watch Mearsheimer discuss his book with Bruce Feiler at bloggingheads here. I would have preferred if they matched him up with one of their political science regulars like Henry Farrel or Daniel Drezner. At Unqualified Offerings it is claimed that Tel Aviv is “Christian-occuppied” territory, which strikes me as plausible as the converse. For an actual example of an Israeli exhibiting the heartless drive for power that some people ascribe to them (which seems odd to me given how small Israel still is after winning a good number of wars) check out Samson Blinded, which is also freely available for download.

But Chip, isn’t the presence of non-Shaker and especially pro-natalist groups a resounding failure? The absence of a meme doesn’t mean any less life exists! Also, if we broaden our anti-natalism to include all-life shouldn’t we encourage humanity to expand and destroy the environment and thereby prevent other life? Forget the hedonic imperative, we’ve got an apocalyptic imperative! Anti-natalism may be more deserving of the title “nihilism” than non-idealism or the Russian revolutionary ideology, it could take it as a moral necessity to destroy all life to prevent suffering.

Chip was being flip with his quip. But if you take the view that each new life is a kind of perilous affair then the question depends on your yardstick. The Shaker meme was successful inasmuch as there are no more Shakers, and those who sign on to similar theological lines would likewise, presumably, not reproduce, in which case it seems pretty clear that you end up with a net decrease in life and consequent harm (notwithstanding some unintended consequence that leads to an offsetting glut of babymaking elsewhere). The absence of new Shakers can thus be read as a victory, albeit a small one, at least for those who might otherwise have been summoned into existence. Imagine if the Pope were to be afflicted with a strange neurological virus that led him to issue a decree that Catholics should stop having children. I’m sure many adherents would ignore the Divine edict, but there would be more than a few to toe the line.

Is antinatalism doomed by evolutionary imperatives? In the ultimate sense, I’m fairly certain that it is, and I have stated as much in my running commentary. But net suffering can be reduced. Memes are wilier survivors than genes, and vasectomies aren’t terribly expensive.

As to the nihilist label, it’s something that comes up a lot and it seems to depend on your definition. I’m not very familiar with the Russian ideological strain, but if the term is taken, as it usually is, to denote the negation of the possibility of truth or meaning, then I don’t think the shoe fits. Antinatalism — at least the ethical variety which I discuss and embrace — proceeds after the recognition of the reality of pain and misfortune, which is a kind of brute truth grounded in science and addressed through a moral rule that says, simply, stop. It’s pert nigh idealistic. Or at least interest-bound.

As to the “apocalyptic imperative,” I think this is where Benatar gets cold feet. If you take seriously the dire calculus posited at http://www.utilitarian-essays.com, especially regarding the prevalence and moral significance of wild animal suffering, AND you adhere to a broadly negative-utilitarian method in assessing the overall good, then it seems to me the ante is upped to the point that genocidal promortalism is hard to dismiss. My approach is to frame antinatalism as a Hareian prescription, which presumes a rule against the initial harm that promortalism contemplates. Of course, Benatar’s position doesn’t allow this and his efforts to diffuse the more unconscionable promortalist conclusion seem consequently — and perhaps tellingly — weak.

As an aside, I think ethical promortalism would have been a great candidate for Brockman’s Edge question re “dangerous ideas.” Perhaps some utilitarian scientist is already hard at work on the doomsday machine. Could account for the tardiness of Fermi’s aliens.

To expand my point: there’s just this big problem that the urge to reproduce is as fundamental an urge as there is, and it’s pretty hard to get around that. Gregory Cochran posits that male homosexuality is caused by an infectious agent. It strikes me that engineering this agent to be more virulent would be one way to accomplish your goals. Although just killing everybody seems to get to the same end state, just one generation early, and that’s a much easier bioengineering problem.

I’m not so sure the ‘urge to reproduce’ is quite so fundamental as the urge to fuck, bringing homosexuality back into the circle of normative variation. I think a lot of the familial evolutionary traits kick in at the second tier, the societal aspect of human evolution; thus the pressures and incentives of different kinds, meant to keep the train on the track.

All this apocalyptic imperative stuff has had me thinking today, but as succinctness has never been my strong suit, I’ll probably leave that for a later post at my site, after I’ve thought through the details some more. For now, just let me say that harm is to life as wet is to water (just walked 3 miles home in the rain); and no matter what happens, knees will get skint…they always do. I WILL say this: if I had the magic button to make it all just go ‘poof’, painlessly and irrevocably, I’d push it. Unfortunately, things are almost never painless, which is sort of the point of this debate.

Everyone here is ignoring the elephant in the room. Namely, that thought processes and conclusions are largely driven by non-rational factors. Longtime readers of O.B. like TGGP should know this like the back of his hand.

And now some of you are now seriously talking about the advisibility of killing off the entire human race. Please get some help. Your thought processes are not any more “rational” than anyone else’s, and they most certainly are negative and dangerous to yourself, and possibly others. . .

Everyone here is ignoring the elephant in the room. Namely, that thought processes and conclusions are largely driven by non-rational factors.
Jim attributes the unpopularity of anti-natalism to just that.

In the case of anti-natalism for “moral reasons”, its etiology in depression is self-evidently obvious.
As I remarked before, depressed people are more rational about pretty much everything except the probability that their depression will end. You could as easily state that the etiology of anti-anti-natalism is in a deficiency of depression.

Your thought processes are not any more “rational” than anyone else’s
If they are depressed, they likely are. Do you disbelieve in varying rationality at all, or do you have a good argument why an anti-natalist that does consider himself more rational should not?

BTW, just labeling an opinion as the result of depression can be a bit misleading, no? I mean, couldn’t things be the other way around, the depression being the result of a realistic, albeit dismal, appraisal of existence? And might not optimism be the naive acquiescence to the status quo, in order to shield oneself from the uncomfortable aspects of reality? Just a thought.

Yeesh! At this point, I’d even welcome a Voxian “I was just following orders” argument, over this dismissal-by-convention stuff, and that goes double for the ‘get some help before you hurt somebody’ claptrap. At least, by adopting an ‘I don’t care what happens to anybody else when it comes to my own personal interests’, Vox is being consistent (at least where this argument is concerned).

As I mentioned, you can just as easily turn the depression charge back against anti-anti-natalists. Also, as both of you have pointed out, you can just as easily say “Stop having children before you hurt someone!”. For some reason this whole thing reminds of this comment at Overcoming Bias where people were accused of taking counter-intuitive positions just to be shocking and forgetting that “Real decisions have real effects on real people”, whereupon the charge was turned around by the “human robots” we all know and love at OB.

Well, jumping in here, I don’t think that procreation is a biological imperative really (or at least not a particularly strong one). Culturally, we may program ourselves for so many children–gotta have hands at the farm and all that, not to mention populate the army–but biologically, I’m with Jim, we’re programmed more to just screw. Animals that are more instinctive breeders tend to go into heat more obviously, and just in time to get knocked up.

Sex with little possibility of procreation currently activates reward circuits in the same manner that sex did in our ancestors. In the future brains will distinguish between them and reward that which results in procreation.

1915: 1.8 Billion people,
2010: 6.8 Billion people,
95 years: 5 Billion people,
2310: 22 Billion people,
Solution to problem: Stop Creating Babies,
I am 100% sure your generations will appreciate not being created and left behind to suffer in that mess of insanity. And it will be one hell of a mess.